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Built To Win: The Female Athlete As Cultural Icon (Sport and Culture)

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Heywood and Dworkin draw on a variety of sources in this thoughtful examination of female athletes, including content and textual analysis and critical and gender theory. Their writing is scholarly and thouroughly researched, yet will also be interesting to non-academic readers. The commentary on various advertisements and other cultural artifacts such as the movie "Fight Club" are very good, as are their explorations of the conumdrums and contradictions encountered by women athletes over how they represent themselves and are represented by others. They also touch more generally on how gender roles and images have changed, not just for women but for men as well.

This is a must-read for women athletes, those who support them, and anyone interested in the topics of sports and gender.

--Vince Prygoski, author of "Worst to First, or, a 'Shock'ing tale of Women's Basketball in Motown" (available from Amazon.com)